G Spot discusses whether the recent extreme weather events we experience result from climate change or if it is the media reflecting on it severely.
Good morning, I’m Austerity Jones, and I’m here with G Spot Johnson today. G Spot, we haven’t heard much from you since your arrest. What have you been up to?
G Spot: I have been mesmerized by the rash of 1,000 year floods that have been happening. I am considering investing in an umbrella company called “what the hella umbrella” 🙂
So, it has been quite a season for flash floods and now everyone is saying these floods are a sign of climate change. I guess that’s because there haven’t been many tornadoes or hurricanes this year. We shall see. I feel like I have aged 5 millennia in the past two weeks as there have been 5 floods of the once in a thousand-year variety. So I wanted to go down memory lane and remind people that just because something didn’t happened on Twitter, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
- About an hour north of Denver is a little town called Loveland, Co. If you start driving west and up into the mountains toward the town of Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, you will largely follow the winding path of the Big Thompson River. Cute little cabins and lodges dot the drive as the road quickly gains elevation. On the night of July 31, 1976 the rain began about 6:30pm and it rained very hard until 11pm when the first flash flood warning was issued, but it was too late as 12 inches of rain had already fell. The warning systems weren’t sophisticated, and many people had went to bed and didn’t answer their phones. While they slept, a wall of water twenty feet high swept down the canyon destroying 400 homes and businesses, almost completely washing out the highway, and killing 144 people. 5 people were never found.
- Outside of the Black Hills in South Dakota lies the town of Rapid City. It lived up to its name on June 9-10 1972. A flash flood struck the town just after midnight after an evening of heavy rain caused by a slow-moving storm front. 15 inches of rain had fallen causing Rapid Creek to overflow and when the swollen Canyon Lake Dam failed, the ensuing flood killed 238 people. It destroyed 1,335 homes and 5,000 automobiles as well. The total amount of rain that the Black Hills received was equal to 1 billion metric tons of water. 5 people were never found.
- But the grand daddy of them all was the Mississippi flood in the spring and summer of 1927. For over 5 months the Mississippi was above flood stage. It was slow moving in comparison to the flash floods mentioned, but it left 700,000 people homeless when it was finished and over 500 dead. The river broke over 100 levees and when it broke the levy at Dorena, Missouri it caused 1.7 million feet per second of water to flow near St. Louis, breaking the record from the flood of 1844 of 1.3 million cubic feet per second and higher than the 1.03 measured in the great flood of 1993. But the most awesome display of its power came on April 21 at 8:00am when the levee broke at Mounds Landing on the Mississippi Delta. Water poured in and in less than 10 days an inland lake large than Rhode Island had formed. The water was 10 feet deep and bordered the original river bank all the way to the Yazoo River. New Orleans was likely saved by the intentional dynamiting of the levees to divert some of the water to less populated areas. An area 3 times the size of New Jersey was eventually covered by the waters with some places 30 feet deep. Many of those displaced lived in temporary tent camps and the response of the then Commerce Secretary was praised. That man was Herbert Hoover and it catapulted him into the White House in 1928 where he proceeded to see over the worst depression in the history of the country and people once again lived in tent villages called Hooverville, but I digress.
So when the internet tells you that Death Valley received 1 and a half inches or so of rain calling it a 1 in a thousand year storm and in the same article tell you that it is the second most rain since 1988. I also happen to know that across the valley at Scotty’s castle they received almost 3 inches of rain in 2015 and a flash flood wiped out the road there and it hasn’t opened since. That was not mentioned in the article. Sensationalism sells, it gets clicks, and it gets funded so when I hear that Eastern Illinois had a 1 in a 1000 year flood, St. Louis had a 1 in a 1000 year flood, Kentucky had a 1 in a 1000 year flood and now Dallas had a 1 in a 1000 year flood. I scratch my head and say huh? I’m not sure what is getting deeper in here: the flood waters or the bullshit. Just a fun fact: in the 1970s, these floods were blamed on global cooling. Newsweek, Time Magazine, and even the Washington Post were all concerned that the 25 year trend of cooling temperatures would lead to a new ice age. It seems that these things just go in cycles. I don’t know that the temperatures are getting smaller on the thermometer or growing larger, but I am confident that mankind’s ego is growing larger and that they think they control
everything. Only time will tell.
In conclusion, When I was young we would just clean-up and go on about rebuilding, but now the emergency declarations have been filed and the federal money is about to roll in. This is more government spending and is inflationary, but wait, C Thomas said no more inflation talk this week so let’s just suffice it to say that it will be an expensive clean-up on aisle America. Maybe all this rain is just the tears of former fiscal conservatives.
Insightfully yours,
G Spot Johnson
Also born on this date:
Sheryl Sandberg,
Janet Evans,
Shania Twain,
and Stifler’s mom.